The Horseman on the Roof (46 page)

They went all round the gallery. They passed by a window, some of whose panels had fallen out of their leading. Outside they could see below them a large, barren garden entirely planted with gray thyme, divided by two paths that crossed in the middle.

Angelo glanced at the young woman and smiled. She smiled back. He remembered to ask if she felt better. Didn't she, for instance, feel a vague pain here? And with the tip of his finger he touched the pit of her stomach.

She said she felt perfectly well, and apologized.

“There's nothing to apologize for,” he said. “You're not responsible if something starts to rot inside you and destroy you. I don't believe in the flies. However small they're said to be, I believe one would feel them as one breathed. I believe there's a place in the stomach or the bowels that suddenly starts to go bad.”

He described how he had massaged the little Frenchman throughout a whole night but all to no effect because he had started too late. You mustn't wait till you're
astonished at yourself,
like the lieutenant of the patrol. As soon as you feel a slight, sharp pricking in the side, you must cry for help. It's worth while, going on living.

“If you really have a pain in the place I've just indicated, you must show me your stomach at once. When it's caught in time and you're massaged, you've ninety-nine chances out of a hundred of surviving.”

At the end of the gallery they discovered a little passage, narrow and very dark, which seemed to run through the thickness of the walls. They had difficulty in dragging their baggage along it. This passage was warm and smelt of dead stone. After turning sharp right they saw a ray of pale light ahead. It came through a narrow slit. Through this could be seen, facing them, the huge tower and the windows of the quarantine, against which the wind thundered.

“We must be on the other side of the soldiers' courtyard, unless those are not the windows we were leaning out of a little while ago.” It was impossible to look down through the slit; they could just make out the row of the quarantine's windows, the crown of battlements, and the sky, bright blue and dappled with little clouds exactly like daisies, lit by a slanting sun.

Farther on, the passage grew so narrow that Angelo was obliged to remove the bags he was carrying on his back. They had to step over rubble and even bend double to pass through places where it was half blocked.

Again a ray of pale light pierced the darkness ahead. This slit, which, like the one before, seemed to be a watchman's loophole, looked out this time onto open space. Again they saw the bright blue sky, dappled with pink, and had a glimpse of the mountains lit by the setting sun.

Beyond, the passage was more and more in ruins. They advanced on all fours, hampered by the cloaks, case, and saddlebags. They made slow progress, in total darkness, over a real rubble-heap. At last Angelo's out-thrust hand touched a sharply chiseled stone and he felt a cool draft coming from below. They had found the opening to something. By the light of sparks from his tinder, then of the wick on which he blew, Angelo saw that they had just emerged into a corkscrew staircase, as narrow as the passage but in good condition. A few turns down and they met daylight again and finally, cautiously, they reached a door that opened onto the thyme garden they had seen through the broken window in the gallery.

The autumn twilight was beginning to fall. They remained hidden. The garden looked as if it were regularly used. There must be other, easier ways into it. The place where Angelo and the young woman were hiding was moreover used as a toolshed, and two spades, a rake, and a big coarse straw hat like those worn by harvesters had been left there.

In the garden there was nothing but thyme and stones. It was clearly a terrace and must overlook a defense platform, a street, a bank—Angelo wondered which, and at what height. But it would have been too rash to go and see. They must wait till evening had really fallen. It was certainly a place loved by the nuns, to judge from those touching garden tools placed ready for tilling a terrace of white earth as dry as salt.

Swifts and swallows began to dart past the door-opening. Following the birds' new custom, as soon as they perceived the motionless figures of Angelo and the young woman, they approached and even flew right in under the vault, wheeling round them with cries and violent wingbeats.

“This could easily give us away,” said Angelo. “Let's go back up the stairs a bit and hide.”

They were hardly settled in the shadow when they heard footsteps in the garden. It was a nun, not at all the red-faced sister with big bare arms, but a tall, thin sort of shopkeeper whose ample black skirt forced upon her a certain look of nobility. She took off her coif, revealing a tiny head and an extraordinarily unpleasant face with quite small and very active black eyes. She came to fetch the rake and began to rake the paths. After which, she fumbled under her skirt, took out of her pocket a horn knife and, crouching down, meticulously weeded around the tufts of thyme. She threw herself with a sort of passion into this useless work.

At last it began to grow dark. The nun having withdrawn, Angelo ran to the edge of the rampart, leaned over, and returned.

“It's only ten to twelve feet high,” he said, “and there's a clump of wild laurel growing in the wall.”

They tied all the luggage together in a bundle.

“I'll carry it,” said Angelo. “We'll have to forget about our horses. Unless you'll agree to a fight. That, I confess, would be balm to my heart and I think you too would get a good breath of fresh air out of it. But it wouldn't be wise. Still, I'd give a lot, and in particular a lesson in fencing, to hear you talk as you did this morning to the soldiers who brought you here. All the time I had the feeling that at some more banal remark than usual you'd show a clean pair of heels and leave them gaping. If you haven't thoroughly understood that in reality we did not surrender, I propose a little battle in the soldiers' courtyard, when we'll make all we have to tell them perfectly clear. Otherwise, we only have to throw the luggage overboard and jump twelve feet, making use of the laurel stump. There's a grass bank on the other side, and it slopes straight down to the fields. We'll walk as far as we can during the night, and tomorrow we shall be far away. I still have over three hundred francs. We'll buy nags of some sort. Would you like to go to that little village near Gap, where you told me your sister-in-law lives?”

“That's exactly what I must do. Besides, have you thought that even if you did give the soldiers a beating, it wouldn't count, seeing that they've certainly got cholera and you haven't? It interferes with swordsmanship, I imagine.”

“You mean it would interfere with mine?” said Angelo very obtusely. “It's possible. We're still a bit stiff and it's no joke to leave this place by slithering on all fours through the walls. A twelve-foot jump isn't much, after all. And there's the laurel stump. I'd have liked to put sense into the heads of those sheep shut up there, but that would mean a song and dance.”

In spite of everything, before they left their shelter, Angelo went to make sure that the other door leading into the garden was shut.

He said to himself: “How different it would all be if I were alone. (Then I don't think. And what a pleasure that is!)”

Five minutes later they were on the slope. The young woman had jumped without fuss and had even made most clever use of the laurel stump. Everything had been extremely easy. Angelo, disappointed, was watching the shadows set up by the rising moon. They were feeling very tranquil. He would have liked some sort of fight, he did not quite know what. He had hoped to find at least one soldier at the foot of the wall, a sentry whom he would have had to disarm. He had had visions of himself struggling and overthrowing his adversary.

A few frogs were chanting in some cisterns that were no doubt half empty and echoed loudly.

“This is great fun,” said the young woman: “it reminds me of an evening when I jumped out of the window to go and dance in the square at Rians. My father hadn't forbidden me to go out, far from it, but any stolen fruit—what a joy! And after all, jumping out of the window!”

“Women,” said Angelo to himself, “are incomplete creatures.”

He wondered why she was suddenly so lively after having been so downcast during the afternoon. “I too enjoyed crawling on all fours through the walls, but I knew how serious our position is. And it wasn't so extraordinary to expect a sentry at the foot of this wall; there should have been if the captain whose voice I heard was doing his job.”

At length Angelo slung the bundle on his back and they set off down the glacis, gently sloping, muffled with grass, and ending in fields of lavender, wide open to freedom on all sides and even faintly scented.

They walked for about an hour through the fields, then found a track leading in the direction Angelo had decided to take. It soon began to climb. The moon, which had gradually taken its place at the highest point in the sky, was shedding a bright light. It revealed the muscular back of a treeless mountain studded with small rocks gleaming like silver.

The night was truly gentle. The crickets, restored to vigor by the heat of that Indian summer's day, were now making their metallic grating sound, which seems like an intoxication of the air itself. The sluggish wind blew warm gusts.

Angelo and the young woman made good progress along this track, which headed vaguely northward. On the other side of the mountain, toward midnight, they crossed a fairly wide road lined by tall poplars, in whose long branches the moonlight played seductively. All was peaceful and reassuring. They even heard the wheels of a carriage in the distance and the jog trot of a horse that seemed to feel at ease in the softness of the night.

They hid behind some tall broom bushes and finally saw a cabriolet pass close by with its hood folded back, carrying a man and woman in calm conversation.

The road from which the cabriolet had come led eastward, along a valley bottom. The company of the poplars, leafless but glazed with white light, was very comforting. Judging from the two who had just passed, that part of the countryside must be agreeable.

“What we need,” said Angelo, who found his bundle absurd now that he had seen the well-sprung cabriolet bowling along behind its horse, “is a carriage like that. It would make up for our horses ten times over. At any rate, it would give us that well-to-do air which intimidates the soldiers. The man and woman we saw talking just now were not fugitives. Seeing them, it's almost impossible to imagine there's a quarantine at Vaumeilh, and yet it's barely twenty kilometers from this road. Let's go and see what there is over there. Especially as it's still more our direction than the one we've been following until now. Let's forget about the rendezvous with Giuseppe. He's big enough to find his way by himself. What matters for us is to get as quickly as possible to that village near Gap where your sister-in-law lives.”

“What is your name?” said the young woman. “Yesterday in the quarantine I needed to call you several times, though I was near you. After all, I can't go on calling you ‘monsieur.' Besides, it's not such a help as a Christian name in delicate situations. Mine is Pauline.”

“My name's Angelo,” said he. “And my surname's Pardi. That's certainly not my father's name. I'm rather proud of its being simply the name of a large forest owned by my mother near Turin.”

“Your first name is very pretty. Will you let me carry my share of the baggage, now that we're walking on a comfortable road?”

“Certainly not. I have a long stride and I don't feel the weight. The cloaks are very soft on the shoulder. Your little case and our bags are properly wrapped up. It's quite enough that you should be forced to walk in riding-boots. That's not too easy. Riders without their mounts are always a bit absurd, but the cabriolet that passed us—which was, I admit, the very image of tranquillity and peace—doesn't reassure me. The only thing that reassures me is the distance we've been putting for some hours between ourselves and that quarantine where you lost your courage for five minutes. Aren't you tired?”

“My boots are excellent and I used always to wear them for my walks in the woods. They were very long walks. My husband is an expert on boots and pistols. It was he who taught me to double-load. He also took care to have boots as pliable as gloves made for me. We live in a country of brushwood and hills where one has to go leagues to distract oneself with the spectacle of nature.”

“That's the way we lived at Granta, before I joined the Cadets. And every time I went home, before I left for France, every day it was some endless ride, or even a road march on which you had to drag your horse by the bridle if you wanted to get out of the forest to see a fine sunset, a beautiful dawn, or simply the open sky my mother loves so much.”

The road had risen little by little onto high land where it wound between woods of ilex. The moon, half buried in the west, was casting that strange light, tinged with yellow, which creates dramatic realities. The horizon into which it was sinking seemed to have burst into silver dust amid which there floated the misty phantom of the mountains. The night was at once dark and brilliant; the trees, etched black against the brightness of the moon, stood out sparkling white against the shadows of the night. The wind no longer knew in which direction to blow; it swayed like a warm palm tree.

Angelo and the young woman had been walking for nearly six hours. They were no longer spurred on by dread of being pursued and captured. These woods were quite different from Vaumeilh, this light far removed from any in which one could picture ordinary patrols.

Twenty paces from the road they found under the ilexes a thicket of tall broom that encircled, as though by design, a little room of warm springy earth. Angelo put down the bundle. It was useless to deny it, he was limp with fatigue and, in spite of the moonlight, had been secretly in a vile temper for the last hour of walking.